I am a princess, a strawberry princess from the farthest coast of the eastern universe that smokes cigarettes and eats sugarcane and splits oranges with her eyes. That may or may not mean a whole lot to you. But it may be that you don’t speak Strawberry.
I have my own language. I know words like
extrapulous that only I know because I make and own them. It was dark the day I found my crown. I was trying to find a clearing in the bus surrounded by heavily-breathers when I noticed it. It looks sort of like a birthmark on my shoulder but it’s a crown from my royal heritage.
I wanted to smoke in celebration, but you can’t smoke on the bus. I wanted to toast in celebration, but you can’t toast on the bus. I wanted to eat in celebration, but you can’t eat on the bus. You can only breathe heavily and curse in the hushed acceptable tones of bus code. You can also chew gum, but you can’t spit it out. So I just sat there and celebrated my royalty silently.
"Extrapulous!" I said out loud as I exited the back door at my stop. Later, as I was walking the long stretch of gum-spotted concrete back to my door, I said it again, “Extrapulous!” And a kid skipping by a bench near a tree laughed so loud he nearly tripped, as if I’d said the funniest thing in the eastern universe.
He ran off before I could ask if he knew the word and how long it had existed in his universe. On the bus the next morning I ran into the same trees and scuttled again for a hopeless clearing. Later, past the spotted stretch, I saw him again. Red cap and torn jeans, writing something blue and illegible across an unlined page. He handed it to me as I walked by.
“I only read Strawberry,” I explained.
“Find a translator.”
Two days later, I did. The girl at the dry cleaners read the foreign scribble aloud.
“This is what happens when I get closed. They swarm me with what they call persuasion. And at times, in effect, I confess, it’s effective. It effectively persuades me to sleep. So I close my eyes and dream. I write on paper the things that I might’ve said once. If she hadn’t said the words that close every portal within me like black magic. I couldn’t talk to her that night because she sat silent with her left leg crossed over her right on the far end of the couch and I rathered write notes to myself than reach for her. Now here we are in the 99th century. But I suppose time, like tradition, endures.”
I have no idea what that meant or where it came from. Or perhaps I do. In truth and the point is it matters little now that we’re here.
And isn’t it always the case that context, like timing, is everything?
